The Young Physician

by Francis Brett Young

He opened the door softly and stepped into the hall. Scarcely knowing what he was doing he looked into the drawing-room. There stood the piano with a sonata of Beethoven upon the music-stand. The room was full of a curious penetrating odour which came, he discovered, from a big vase full of pinks that had faded and gone yellow. Some days ago, he supposed, his mother had picked them. Her hands . . . he worshipped her hands. A strange and uncontrollable impulse made him bend and kiss the dead flowers.

But the atmosphere of that room was if anything more cruel than the other. He couldn’t stay there. Once more he found himself in the darkness and quiet of the hall. The house had never been so silent. Only, in the corner an oak grandfather’s clock with a brass face engraved with the name of Carver, Hay, ticked steadily. In the silence he heard his own heart beating far faster than the clock.

Scarcely knowing what he was doing he climbed upstairs and crept quietly to the door of the room where his mother was lying. He knelt on the mat outside the door and listened. Inside the room there was no sound; not even a sound of breathing. If only he dared open the door. . . . If only he could see her for a second she might smile at him and he would be satisfied. He was thankful to find that the mere fact of being nearer to her made him feel more happy. For a long time he knelt there, and then, hearing a slight noise in his own room, where his father was supposed to be resting, he stole downstairs again, a little comforted, opened the front door and went out into the garden.

II

Mrs. Barrow, at whose house it had been arranged that Edwin should put up for the night, was the Ingleby’s nearest neighbour and their landlady. The gardens of the two houses stood back to back with a high wall between, and the relations of the neighbours had always been so friendly that the little door in the wall was never locked, even though it was so seldom used that tendrils of ivy had attached themselves to the woodwork, forming a kind of natural hinge.

On the Inglebys’ side of the wall lay a modern well-kept garden, not more than twenty years old. Edwin’s mother had a passion for flowers, and his father had made the gratification of her pleasure his favourite hobby, so that Edwin’s earliest memories of both of them were associated with the gathering of fruits and blooms, with the rich odours of summer, or, above all, the smell of newly-turned earth. This summer Mr. Ingleby had planted the long bed that stretched along the side of the house towards the door in Mrs. Barrow’s wall with masses of delicately-coloured stocks. Though the form of these flowers was not particularly beautiful their scent rose to meet him in a hot wave of overpowering sweetness. He remembered a letter in which his mother had told him how wonderful they were. Everything reminded him of her. . . .

He passed through the door in the wall and entered another world.

Everything connected with Mrs. Barrow was in character. She was a little old woman, the widow of a small manufacturer who had set his mark upon the countryside by the erection of a chimney stack taller than any other in the district, so tall that even from the summit of Pen Beacon it made a landmark more prominent than the slender spire of Halesby church. In Edwin’s eyes its presence was so familiar that he had almost become fond of it. Many and many times on windy days he had watched the immense structure swaying gently as a reed in a summer breeze. Under the shadow of Mr. Barrow’s monument lay an old garden designed on the formal lines of a hundred years ago, full of honeysuckle arbours and narrow twisted paths: so rich, and so tangled that every year a great part of its fruitfulness ran to waste. Long rows of lavender were there; and alleys of hoary apple-trees whose gnarled branches overreached the paths: and the whole place was so crowded with decaying vegetable matter and the mould of fallen leaves that even in high summer it had an autumnal savour and a ripe smell that was not unlike that of an apple loft.

Through this shady precinct he passed carrying his hand-bag, pausing only in a sudden patch of light where a bank of tawny scabious diffused an aromatic perfume in the sun. He paused, not because he was impressed by their garish beauty, but because many of the heads were now frequented by a new hatch of Comma butterflies eagerly expanding their serrated wings, drugged already with the flowers’ harsh honey. Edwin had never seen this uncommon butterfly before. In the neighbourhood of St. Luke’s the species, which is notoriously capricious, had never appeared. He wished that he had a butterfly net with him: for by catching one of them he would have scored over Widdup.

So he passed to Mrs. Barrow’s house, a dark Georgian structure as twisted and autumnal as her garden, and there, in a gloomy sitting-room, he found the old lady herself, a little demure creature with round-hunched, shawl-covered shoulders, like the dormouse in Alice in Wonderland, taking tea with her companion, a decorous lady of the same age named Miss Beecock.